you know i am so bad at tech that my daughter who is now forty one when she was five was overheard by me to say to a friend of hers if it doesn't bleed when you cut it my daddy doesn't understand
so the assignment i've been given may be
obstacle for me but i'm certainly going to try what have i heard during these last four days this is my third visit to ted one was to tedmed and one as you've heard was a regular ted two years ago
an interlarding an intermixing of a sense of social responsibility in so many of the talks
global responsibility in fact appealing to enlightened self interest but it goes far beyond enlightened
that they're not saying well this is what we should do this is what i would like you to do it 's this is what i have done because i'm excited by it because it's a wonderful thing and it's done something for me and of course it's accomplished
a great deal it's the old concept the real greek concept of philanthropy in its original sense phil anthropy the love
of humankind and the only explanation i can have for some of what you've been hearing in the last four days is that it arises in fact
out of a form of love and this gives me enormous hope and hope of course is the topic that i'm supposed to be speaking about which i'd completely forgotten about until i
and when i did i thought well i'd better look this word up in the dictionary so sarah and i my wife walked over to the public library which is four blocks away on pacific street
we got the oed and we looked in there and there are fourteen definitions of hope
none of which really hits you between the eyes as being the appropriate one and of course that makes sense because hope is an abstractphenomenon it's an abstract idea it's not a concrete word
well it reminds me a little bit of surgery if there's one operation for a disease you know it works if there are fifteen operations you know that none of them work and that's the way it is with definitions of words
if you have appendicitis they take your appendix out and you're cured if you've got reflux oesophagitis there are fifteen procedures and joe schmo does it one way and will blow does it another way and none of them work and that's the way it is with this word hope
they all come down to the idea of an expectation of something good that is due to happen and you know what i found out the indo european root of the word hope
is a stem k e u we would spell it k e u it's pronounced koy and it is
the same root from which the word curve comes from but what it means in the original indo european is a change in direction going in a different way
and i find that very interesting and very provocative because what you've been hearing in the last couple of days is
the sense of going in different directions directions that are specific and unique to problems there are different paradigms you've heard that word several times in the last four days and everyone 's familiar with
paradigms so when we think of hope now we have to think of looking in other directions than we have been looking there's another not definition but description of hope that has always appealed to me
and it was one by vaclav havel in his perfectlyspectacular book breaking the peace in which he says that hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right
but the expectation that they will make sense regardless of how they come out i can't tell you how reassured i was
by the very last sentence in that gloriouspresentation by dean kamen a few days ago i wasn't sure i heard it right so i
found him in one of the inter sessions he was talking to a very large man but i didn't care i interrupted and i said
did you say this he said i think so so here 's what it is i'll repeat it the world will not be saved by the internet
mean anything supernatural certainly not coming from this skeptic what i mean is this ability that each of us has to be something greater than
an elemental level we have all felt that spirituality at the time of childbirth some of you
have felt it in laboratories some of you have felt it at the workbench we feel it at concerts i've felt it in the operating room at the bedside
it is an elevation of us beyond ourselves and i think that it's going to be in time the elements of the human spirit that we've been hearing
about bit by bit by bit from so many of the speakers in the last few days and if there's anything that has permeated this room it is precisely
that i'm intrigued by a concept that was
brought to life in the early part of the nineteenth century actually in the second decade of the nineteenth century by a twenty seven year old poet
that he wrote some perfectly wonderful essays too and the most well remembered essay is one called
a defence of poetry now it's about five six seven eight pages long and it gets kind of deep and difficult after about the third page
but somewhere on the second page he begins talking about the notion
that he calls moral imagination and here 's what he says roughly translated
a man generic man a man to be greatly good must imagine clearly
he must see himself and the world through the eyes of another and of many others see
and the world not just the world but see himself what is it that is expected of us
by the billions of people who live in what laurie garrett the other day so appropriately called despair and disparity what is it that they have every right
to ask of us what is it that we have every right to ask of ourselves out of our shared humanity and out of the human spirit well you know precisely what it is
a great deal of argument about whether we as the great nation that we are should be the policeman of the world the world 's constabulary
but there should be virtually no argument about whether we should be
the world 's healer there has certainly been no argument about that in this room in the past four days
so if we are to be the world 's healer every disadvantaged person in this world including in the united states becomes our patient
it comes initially from the latin patior to endure or to suffer
so you go back to the old indo european root again and what you find the indo european stem is pronounced payen we would spell it p a e n and lo and behold mirabili dictu it is the same root
as the word compassion comes from p a e n so the lesson is very clear the lesson is that our patient the world and the disadvantaged of the world
that patient
our compassion but beyond our compassion and far greater than compassion is our moral imagination and our identification
with each individual who lives in that world not to think of them as a huge forest
but as individual trees of course in this day and age the trick is not to let each tree be obscured by that bush in washington that can get
can get in the way
so here we are we are should be morally committed to being the healer of the world and
we have had examples over and over and over again you've just heard one in the last fifteen minutes of people who have
not only had that commitment but had the charisma the brilliance and i think in this room it's easy to use the word brilliant my god
the brilliance to succeed at least at the beginning of their quest and who no doubt will continue to succeed as long as more and more of us enlist ourselves
in their cause now if we're talking about medicine and we're talking about healing
i'd like to quote someone who hasn't been quoted it seems to me everybody in the world 's been quoted here pogo 's been quoted shakespeare 's been quoted backwards forwards inside out
i would like to quote one of my own household gods i suspect he never really said this because we don't know what hippocrates really said but we do know for sure that one of the great greek physicians said the following
and it has been recorded in one of the books attributed to hippocrates and the book is called precepts and i'll read you what it is remember i have been talking about essentially philanthropy
the love of humankind the individual humankind and the individual humankind that can bring that kind of love translated into action translated in some cases into enlightened self interest
and here he is twenty four hundred years ago where there is love of humankind there is love of healing
we have seen that here today with the sense with the sensitivity
and in the last three days and with the power of the indomitable human spirit thank you very much
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